Recently, a student of my Guided Study program thought that her clients – franchisees who sell her product – might do well to add Buying Facilitation® to their sales skills so they could close  more sales.

I sent a couple of blog posts for the folks to read, and then had a phone conference with them. My job was to help them understand more about the model, and to use Facilitative Questions on them to not help them decide if adding new skills would help them sell better, but actually give them the ‘feel’ of how helping manage the buying decision worked.

What happened during our meeting is something that occasionally happens when sales folks first consider working first with the buying decision: they defend their status quo.

With a close rate of well under 10%, these folks defended their current skills: by any rational standard they rejected the possibility of being more successful, preferring to maintain their status quo. Are they being irrational? We generally think our prospects irrational when our solution can solve their problem and they don’t choose us, don’t we?

But I do not believe in the words ‘irrational’ or ‘rational.’ Like all decision makers (yes, even our buyers) these folks have made the best decision for themselves at this moment: they are being totally rational – within their unique system.  These folks are more comfortable with their status quo, regardless of their success rate, than they are with the prospect of change, even at the expense of more money and more clients.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

For those of you interested in deeply exploring change and how new decisions get made, my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it minutely depicts how people make the internal decisions necessary for changing congruently - and making a buying decision is more of a change management problem than a problem resolution issue: until or unless the status quo gets buy-in from the appropriate people and policies, the risk of change is greater than the risk of doing what they’ve been doing (the results of which are already built in to the system).

Suffice it to say, that change isn’t just a matter of having a new thought, or adding a solution. The reality is that if we really, really thought there was something THAT wrong we would have changed already. The fact that we (and our buyers) are in the environment that we’re in, is a testament to the decisions that have already been made: the status quo is a sum total of all of our decisions to date.

When it’s time for us to change, we must make sure that we somehow integrate the new with the decisions and behaviors we’ve already created and maintain daily. Until or unless we are able to figure out how to reconfigure our rules and roles and relationship and ego issues, we will take no action at all – even if it means sticking with something that’s less than successful. That’s right: even with a 7% closing ratio, many many sales professionals would prefer to continue doing what they are doing rather than change and mess up what they have grown accustomed to and have rationalized and internalized.

THE SALES MODEL IS BROKEN

But the truth is, the sales model is stupid, not our buyers. It only manages the needs assessment and solution placement end of the buying decision, and leaves the buyer to manage the hard part alone. So I can sit and listen to how inefficient a prospect’s sales model is, and I can have the absolute perfect solution (and I DO, I DO), and they won’t/can’t buy. Because until or unless there is buy-in throughout the relevant parts of the system, the buyer CANNOT take action.

Sales does not handle this dilemma. But it’s possible to work first with the decision making/change issues that buyers must manage before they can even begin considering a solution.

Before you decide on learning Buying Facilitation®, or adding it to your current skill set, answer the following Facilitative Questions:

• What would you need to know or believe differently about what you are doing to be able to know when it would be time to add a new skill set?
• What is it about your current skills that you’d like to maintain so you can ensure that anything new wouldn’t destroy what you already do successfully?
• How would you know that Buying Facilitation® could fit with your current skills in a way that would maintain your personal integrity and beliefs about who you are as a sales professional?

Because until or unless you can be assured that you can make a change that is integrous with who you are, you will do nothing.

Are you willing to help your clients work from inner choices rather than need/solution, so they won’t resist?

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Microsoft is putting on a virtual event that you might want to be a part of. They are going to be discussing how to improve your sales organizations, through briefs, presentations, and forum discussions. Also, as an added bonus, another one of the Focus Experts (I’m one as well), Dave Brock, will be giving his thoughts on high performance sales training.

http://crm.dynamics.com/DynamicsBusiness

Resistance to change: inexplicable, irrational, and real is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I had so much fun with you all in April with my Steps to a Sales Call contest that I’m going to run another one. This time I’d like you to use your own words to define my concepts re helping buyers manage their behind-the-scenes decision issues. I’d like to either 1. use your definitions in addition to the ones I use, 2. help you correct your mis-perceptions, or 3. redefine terms the way you’re comfortable using them.

To be part of the official contest, please ’define’ at least 4 of the terms and start a public dialogue with me. I will send each participant one of my Dirty Little Secrets books.

Here’s the deal: without taking definitions from my books (you can use previous blog posts, however) write up some definitions to the following terms:

• Buying Facilitation®
• Facilitative Questions
• decision facilitation
• buyer’s buying decisions
• navigating the buying decision
• the system buyers live in
• the change management issues buyers must address
• the difference between buy-in and buying decisions
• Buying Facilitation® and Sales: how do they work together?

As you think about the definitions, remember this: sales handles the needs assessment and solution placement end of the buyer’s decisions, but does nothing to address their off-line, behind-the-scenes, private and personal dialogues, relationships/political issues they must address internally (and not problem/need/solution driven) prior to getting the buy-in necessary to choose a solution or vendor.

I know your definitions may be wildly different from mine – many of you are still thinking “sales sales sales.” But hopefully, through our dialogue, we can both learn: you can learn the difference between the solution sale and the pre-sale, private buying decision issues, and I can learn how to say the damn thing so more of you can understand what I’m talking about.

I’ll respond frequently to your comments and I’ll publish my definitions on May 25. Thanks, everyone. And make sure I have a way to reach you so I can send you a book!

If you would like to submit this contest to twitter, please click here.

CHOICES FOR SUBMISSION

1. Comment here: For those of you who want to just talk to me, or others in the Buying  Facilitation® community, this is the easiest route.

2. Blogs: If you find this exercise interesting, or like the thinking about decision facilitation, you could write a blog post, or I could do a visiting post for you.

3. Facebook: Can you do a status update: do your friends want to discuss how buyer’s buy with you? Do they want to learn how to manage the entire sale? If you can get something exciting started with lots of buy-in and discussion,  I’ll send you a Buying Facilitation® in a Box. Be sure to make your status update open to the public with the hashtag #SDContest.

And thanks for ‘playing’ with me.

sd

The Definition Game: name that concept is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here are my choices, in the correct order, with an explanation under each. We can all discuss these. Submit your comments below.

First a comment: the sales model only manages needs assessment and solution placement. Unfortunately it acts as of their ‘need’ were a isolated event. It’s not. Buyers live in a ’system’ that holds their Identified Problem in place and maintains it over time, creating work-arounds that become part of the system. Before buyers can make a purchase, their must be buy-in to the proposed change, and the buy-in must manage all of the people and policies and relationships involved in the work-around the buyer has in place. In other words, a buying decision is far more complex than just fixing a problem. Buying Facilitation® is a decision navigation model that helps buyers recognize and make their internal decisions and bring together the right people and so they can make a purchase. It’s an add-on to sales.

Here are the steps in selling with Buying Facilitation® at the front end. The first phase helps decisions get made to promote buy-in, change, and recognition of what needs to be addressed. We usually wait for buyers to do this, but now we can help. Have a look at the steps, and see how you can add them to what you’re doing.

Help the gatekeeper discover who your best point of contact would be.

Do NOT try to ‘get through’ the gatekeeper. She knows the best person to connect you with – she is your friend. And do NOT attempt to ‘go to the top.’ The top person is rarely ‘the decision maker’ and almost always delegates to the correct people. Sellers waste so much time trying to get to the CEO. Instead, ask for the CEO’s assistant, and tell her what you need, and she’ll get you to the right people. Question: who is in control of the conversation – you? or the Gatekeeper? It’s a no-brainer.

Use Facilitative Questions to get into rapport and have them begin to examine how or if or why they would consider changing their status quo.

Until or unless prospects determine to make a change, it doesn’t matter whether you can see their need, your solution is perfect, they think they need you/your solution, they love your solution and you’re giving them great service, etc. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. Do you need to be working out more? It’s not about the gym. Using Facilitative Questions, prospects can collect their unconscious previous choices, and determine how, why, if, when they would consider adding new choices – like fixing a problem or choosing a solution.

One of the Facilitative Questions that I ask (as part of a series and not asked alone) when placing a sales training is: How would you know if it were time to add new sales skills to the ones you’re already offering your sales folks? This question gets them to think about the steps they need to take, the new choices they need to make, and if they are getting what they want now.

Remember: solutions are irrelevant at this stage. Facilitative Questions help the BUYER see the whole picture of what is going on strategically and tactically in their company, family, or system. Until or unless they know how to manage their system first, they will take no action. This has been left out of sales.

Lead prospects/buyers through the systems issues they must consider in order to determine how any proposed change will disrupt their status quo.

Facilitative Questions and Presumptive Summaries are used to help buyers look at their status quo with an unbiased eye. No matter what their ‘need’ or ‘problem’  if they don’t think they can change in a way that will maintain systems congruence, they will do nothing. Remember: the buyer’s environment/culture/system has lived with the Identified Problem until now, and can continue to do so. If they had had known how to resolve it differently, they would have resolved it already.

Facilitate prospect’s discovery of what sorts of strategic issues they must manage to get folks on board with potential change.

There are 3 levels of decisions necessary: systems, strategic, and tactical. Addressing them in this order is optimal. It’s important to note that things are rarely this simple: it’s usually an iterative process.

Lead prospects/buyers through tactical issues they must manage before they can choose a solution.

Once they determine that 1. their system would be willing to shift to add something/change/resolve something; 2. that their rules, relationships, people, are willing to change; 3. they know how to shift congruently, they will then be willing to bring in a new solution. Until or unless their status quo is reconfigured in a way that the insiders are willing to support, they will do nothing: the risk to their functioning is too high. Hence the longer-than-necessary sales cycle.

You sit and wait for them to do this anyway. They must do it with you or without you – so it might as well be with you.

Help the prospect choose the members of the Buying Decision Team.

Through your decision facilitation process, help the buyer recognize the right people to bring in. Usually they don’t know who it will be until way down the road when they’ve stumbled across the appropriate job descriptions… much like you don’t know all the trials you’ll face before you start a move. Prospects haven’t ever done this particular change before, and it takes a while for them to get it right. We can either help them navigate through, or we can wait. They must do it.

Discuss how your solution fits with the internal issues that they must manage.

This step is about melding your solution with the entire range of issues they have to manage internally, including the people, policies, and relationships.

Discuss/present your solution and show the prospect/buyer how it would fit with their need/problem.

Once they do all of the above, they will know how to buy, and you can mention just those bits of data they need to know, to recognize how it fits within their entire picture. It’s not about the features and functions: How, exactly, will the Buying Decision Team know how to manage the new solution with their team, or bring one in so there is buy-in and nothing is disrupted.

Follow up to see if there is anything you can do to help the prospect/buyer decide to purchase.

This is part of a good sales job, of course.

WHAT CAN BE OMITTED

Develop marketing materials to professionally represent your solution either on-line or in person.

When working with KPMG, they shifted from their half a million dollar wizzy presentation to a $35,000 presentation then down to nothing. Once a buyer and their team recognize and manage all of the internal issues they must address, a large presentation is rather moot. First of all, you’re material is on-line. Second of all, they already know who you are and trust you (you’ve been on the Buying Decision Team with them). Third, they already know how to manage their buying decision process and how, exactly, your product will fit with their strategic and tactical issues. So a formal pitch is often no longer necessary.

These are not necessary at all:

Make an appointment to get in front of the prospect

This is a hold-over from another era. If your job is to first help buyers put together their decision team and figure out how to make buying decisions, your bright shiny face is irrelevant. You can do all of the above without meeting a client. And then when you get there, the entire Buying Decision Team will be there and you wouldn’t have wasted any time/visits.

Manage objections and differentiate yourself from the competition.

The sales model creates objections because it pushes data/solution info against a ‘closed system.’ When you hear an objection, it’s merely the system defending itself against change. Once you teach the system how to manage buy-in without disruption, there are no objections.

That’s it, folks. Let’s start a discussion. Let me know how your thinking has changed. And if you want to learn more, read my new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it in which Buying Facilitation® and the new decision navigation system is developed in detail. And thanks for playing!

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Wanting to learn more? Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation® - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions. In addition, you will also receive a bonus illustrated booklet.

The Steps of a Sale: from the buying decision to the close is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Buying Facilitation® is a great model for helping buyers navigate their behind-the-scenes political and relationship issues that must achieve buy-in before they get consensus to purchase a solution – you know, that mysterious stuff buyers go through privately while we sit and wait for them to buy.

By using both two models consecutively, selling and buying becomes a very different experience than the one we are accustomed to: the timing is different, the skills are different, the outcomes are different, the relationship is different and the competitive and money factors fade away.

Indeed, sellers can enter the buying environment much, much earlier, be a coach as buyers gather the appropriate players and handle their buy-in issues, and lead them through all of the behind-the-scenes decisions they must  make by being a part of the Buying Decision team – not as a seller, but as a management consultant and change agent dedicated to buyers achieving excellence. They have to do this stuff anyway: might as well be with you. You sit and wait while they do it anyway.

THE BUYER’S DECISION JOURNEY FIRST, THEN PROBLEM RESOLUTION SECOND

By beginning the buyer/seller relationship with a different agenda and skill set as a neutral navigator and using unbiased, systems-based Facilitative Questions to help buyers think through their range of relationship/political issues (like the department heads that need to get along, or the pesky tech team who try to take over the initiative, or the boss that wants to use her favored vendor) you can lead buyers through the non-problem-based, confusing stuff they need address to help them chart a course through their pre-purchase decision issues.

And then, once they determine how and why and if and when they can resolve their problem with minimum disruption, know who will be involved, and the criteria they all need to meet to move forward with any change,  then you can start the process of understanding the specifics of their problem and know the right way to introduce your solution. First, neutral, unbiased change agent/coach. Second, gather data about full spectrum of need, and then place solution.

Let me break that down for you:

BUYING FACILITATION®

Step one: Make contact as a change agent. Lead a prospect through the discovery of where they are, what excellence would look like to them in the area your solution can resolve, and if there is a difference.

Step two: help the prospect discover all of the internal factors (many unknown, many historic, and all that they have to manage before considering doing anything different) that keep them where they are.

Step three: by using the right Facilitative Questions (based on helping prospect discover and manage their unconscious criteria), be placed on the Buying Decision Team to continue leading the buyer through all of the off-line, private decision issues they’ll need to address so they can garner buy-in.

Step four: continue to help prospects

• collect the right people,
• recognize their internal systems issues that are maintaining the status quo,
• help them re-organize,
• plot out the steps for adopting a solution that the whole Buying Decision Team would buy-in to,
• recognize any fall-out before they can even consider the right solution.

SALES

Step five: gather the appropriate data to see how your solution would fit and serve.

Step six: discuss your solution in detail, using the buyer’s buying criteria as they have discovered it, and introduced in a way that will teach the buyer how to manage the internal politics that you and the Buying Decision Team have just worked through.

SALES TODAY

In general the steps of sales today start with my Step Five (except when using the Internet as a lead generator, and then many companies start with Step Six, mistakenly assuming once the buyer makes contact they already know your solution fits and they are ready to buy). But make no mistake: buyers need to do the first steps anyway – with you or without you. It is here that you lose your sale.

How many times have you had the exact right solution and the buyer doesn’t buy? It’s not because your solution doesn’t fit or because they don’t like you or your price: it’s because they couldn’t get buy-in to do something different, or the internal politics demanded a different solution, or the status quo prevailed because they didn’t know how to keep their system in tact and determined that the risk and cost would be lower to do nothing.

You lose sales because buyers have a tough time navigating their internal decision issues, and sales doesn’t offer a model to help them do that.

Remember: the time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle – answers that most likely have absolutely nothing to do with your solution or their need, and everything to do with internal politics, relationships, and the unknown.

Buying Facilitation® is not sales. It’s a decision facilitation model that leads buyers through all of the internal navigation issues they must resolve privately and off-line before they get agreement to do anything different. Using sales, there are no skills to start where BF begins (As my book Dirty Little Secrets says over and over, don’t compare this to sales.) but you lose sales, lose time, lose money because you don’t.

Buyers are going to do this with you, or without you. And they do it very haltingly and inefficiently. Learn this model, add it to the front end of what you are doing now, and close more sales quicker – a lot more sales, a lot quicker.

Do you want to sell? or have someone buy? They are two different activities, and you need skills to support both.

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Buying Facilitation® and Sales: the dynamic duo is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Of course, we all make mistakes – like that time I partnered with a man in India (Ok, ok. I should have known, right?). The idea was to make me a recognized brand throughout India, and then have him represent me as a trainer and speaker. We were to share the costs. Except we didn’t. I paid my half, and then was forced to pay his, when I received a call from our publicist 5 months later asking me if I’d please please pay him. When I asked my new partner about it, he said, “Oh, right. Well, I didn’t like what he did.” He did a fabulous job, I said. “I agree, but he didn’t give me the type of follow up paper (outside the contract) I wanted. So I didn’t pay him, and I don’t want you to either until he does what I asked.” Next.How do we know up front who is a responsible business person, who will do what we agree and be professional? And if people are referred as being trustworthy, how will we know that they will be with us? How do we know that our clients will like the new offering? How do we partner to get the best out of our joint offering?

Here is a list of Facilitative Questions (not facilitatING questions, or evoking questions, or enabling questions, as some folks are redefining  the term Facilitative Questions) to ask yourself to help you recognize when to stay in and when to get out:

• What will I need to vet for, before we begin doing business, to know that someone will be trustworthy? How can I correctly and quickly recognize any personality issues as being warning signs?
• What will I see or understand about a person to know if it’s even worth the time to consider if his/her offering fits with my vision?
• What sort of sign posts should I put up to measure success along the route, and enable me to make timely corrections or get out at the appropriate time?
• How will I know before I begin that a potential partner is so creative and driven that working with them would be an asset whether or not it is obvious that we have a natural fit? And how will I know if a potential partner would be so problematic to work with that even with a natural fit it wouldn’t be a good idea?
• How will I know, before we begin, that my client base will be excited by the new offering?
• What will I need to see before sitting down with this new person so I’ll know if we can communicate in a way that will instill creativity and leadership in both of our companies, and ensure continual success?
• What sort of failsafes should I, and my potential partner, put in place up front to track if we are getting off base?

I hope these questions help you think through partnerships. Good luck. And, if you want to learn how to formulate Facilitative Questions, let me know.

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• Want to know more about Buying Facilitation®?
• Do you want to learn how to formulate Facilitative Questions?

Partnering: Who’s appropriate? Who’s not? And how can you tell? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

My clients consistently close sales in a minimum of half the time it used to take them. Why? Because Buying Facilitation® gets them onto the Buying Decision Team on the first call, and they immediately being helping navigate the buyers through their often unknowable internal decision issues.

It’s not rocket science: the sales model pushes against the status quo, causing the status quo to defend itself. Sales treats a buyer’s alleged need, or ’problem,’ as if it were an isolated event; it has no capability to support buyers as they discover and manage the off-line change management issues they must address internally and privately prior to making a purchase. Indeed, the buyer’s internal system fights any chaos that would take place if the new solution entered too soon, and thereby rejects outside influence.

Think about coming home with a brand new luxury car before discussing the purchase with your wife or managing the budget or garage space: just because the family might need a car, until or unless all of the internal factors are managed, no change can take place without chaos.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NEED

It’s not about the need, or the solution. Until or unless buyers figure out how to navigate through the off-line systems issues so that there will be no disruption, they will take no action and make no purchase, regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution.

When you enter the call as a neutral navigator, and recognize your first job to be a GPS system that helps the buyer make sense of their internal politics and relationships and vendors and tech groups, and how they all support change or a new solution, you can be immediately recognized as a true support person and put onto the Buying Decision Team immediately. But note: don’t think ’sales’ as it’s not a sales model.

ON KPMG’S BUYING DECISION TEAM

I’ll recount a very funny story – my favorite of how I got onto the Buying Decision Team. Years ago I received a call from the training partner at KPMG. He had interest in learning Buying Facilitation®. He actually said, “Intuitively, I can tell that using this model would decrease our sales cycle (which it ultimately did – from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle).”

As he started asking me questions, I stopped him and turned the conversation around: no matter how brilliant my solution was, if he and his Buying Decision Team didn’t know how to choose it and if it didn’t fit with their environment, it didn’t matter as he wouldn’t be able to buy it.

“How are you currently adding new skills to the ones you currently train to your Partners?” “What has stopped you from offering the skills that would help your Partners support the buyer’s buying process rather than being solution-driven?”

After a couple of these Facilitative Questions, he didn’t have any answers. I told him to get some answers and call me back. And to this end, I gave him a couple of more Facilitative Questions to help him navigate through his confusion. He called me back a few days later with a couple of Senior Partners on the phone.

“I figured if we’re going to consider bringing you in, we might need a couple of the decision makers to get involved with helping me figure it out. I wasn’t doing such a great job on my own anyway – your questions made me realize this was a larger undertaking than just bringing you in.”

He introduced me to the 2 others, and I began posing more Facilitative Questions. One of them stumped them:

“How would you and your Buying Decision Team know, before you began, that taking the time and paying the price to bring in a new skill set - Buying Facilitation® or anything new – would give you the skills you seek?”

They didn’t know the answer to this, so I told them to call me back when they had the answer. This back and forth went on for a total of 2 months; on each call there were more people than the previous call. Finally, one Friday when I was in Toronto with a client, they called me at 7:00 a.m. with about 15 people from several countries on the call.

As I was going through more of my Facilitative Questions (which were help them figure out how to manage internal change, who would need to be involved to get the necessary internal buy-in, how the change would have to be managed at each step of the way, etc.), one of the participants said to my initial client:

“Hey Steve. What is she selling?”

Silence. Finally, “I have no idea.’

“How long have you been talking to her.”

“About two months.”

“Two months and you have no idea what she’s selling?”

“Sharon Drew, why haven’t you ever given us a pitch?”

“Until you all understand what change will look like, and you get the internal buy-in you need to bring in a new program such as the one I have, it doesn’t matter what I’ve got, does it?”

“If you don’t give me a pitch now, I’m going to hang up.”

So I gave him a pitch. And we worked together for 2 years. How much time did I put in? Probably a total of about 60 minutes over 2 months. No proposal. No money discussions. No objections. No competition.

If I had taken the first call and done a pitch, I assure you that the Partners would have stopped the collaboration in its tracks, as it was obvious they had no idea how to bring in another ‘consultant’ or know what success would look like. But I taught them how to figure it out. And I was their guide all the way through.

Would you rather sell? or have someone buy. They are truly two different things.

sd

Get onto the Buying Decision Team on the First Call is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Facilitative Questions are used to help people re-weight their unconscious criteria so they can make new decisions that possibly achieve a new level of excellence according to their own standards – they do not influence, manipulate, push/pull, or bias in any way. Nor do they use ‘information’ as a basis.

Information – having it, sharing it, or receiving it – does not teach someone how to make a new decision: we (and our prospects) make decisions in accordance with our unique, private, weighted criteria that are sometimes (often) unconscious. And until or unless any new decision choices are agreed to by our status quo, no change will take place no matter how necessary.

WHAT IS A FACILITATIVE QUESTION?

Facilitative Questions actually work with the natural decision sequencing of the brain, and gather internal criteria in a way that makes new decisions and change possible.

Think of a time when you had a less-than-optimal habit, say, eating bad foods, or smoking, or procrastinating. I imagine that you had lots of data to let you know that you might have to choose different options. But you haven’t, and your old behaviors prevail regardless of how they may be harming you or others.

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to consider adding new options to the choices you’re making? And how would you know that any particular options would be more acceptable than others?

Those are Facilitative Questions. They:

1. are posed in such a way that they actually teaches you where to look internally to  recognize and choose the criteria that is maintaining your current state, and the first place you’d need to address when beginning to consider change (change must begin with a belief change);
2. are used to help you determine what you need to do differently to be able to bring in a new choice congruently;
3. don’t gather or share data but helps you define your (possibly unconscious) criteria for choice;
4. are part of a sequence of how brains decide – not as a one-shot influencing strategy;
5. can potentially re-weight your (unconscious) criteria/beliefs so you can actually begin making new choices…. but based on your own criteria, not external information (which may unwittingly fight against something new).

Obviously, there are times when information-gathering is important, and using conventional questions is necessary. But for those times when you seek to help others take an action they haven’t taken to date – to make their own best decisions – it’s necessary for them to recognize and manage the internal criteria that are keeping the status quo in tact, and then take the further step of figuring out how to make a change that won’t disrupt the status quo.

Think about why you pose questions and how. How would you know that adding a new form of question to your selling or coaching skill set would help your prospects make the decisions they need to make to allow you to serve them?

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Want to hear Sharon Drew using Buying Facilitation® to introduce dozens of different types of sales, customer service, fund raising, complaints, and problem solving situations?

What are questions for? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I suppose the good news is that, like the other terms (‘decision facilitation’ and Buying Facilitation®) I coined over the past 20 years, my thinking is being accepted into the mainstream. But the bad news, what I was warned about but didn’t think would happen to me, is that folks are interpreting the terms in any way they want, regardless of the real definitions.

I’d like to take this opportunity to define the term/concept/skill.

In Dirty Little Secrets I define Facilitative Questions as: “a unique type of question that…help people recognize all of the internal criteria they’ll need to include and address before making a decision. They are unlike conventional questions in that they do not gather information and are not focused on understanding need or placing a solution. Instead they are unbiased, systems based….Each Facilitative Question demands some action. The gleaned data is for the decision maker’s edification.” The content from these questions actually teach the questionee how to make a new decision based on their own internal values.

In addition:

1. Facilitative Questions are NOT open questions. Open questions gather data – pull information out from someone who has already made a decision on this topic and is sharing their choices with the questioner. Open questions are very biased as per the needs of the questioner. In sales, sellers typically ask open questions so they can determine ‘need’ or understand where the ‘pain’ is so they can better position their product.

2. Facilitative Questions are systems based, and not reliant on content. They follow the sequence of how decisions are made (generically) and lead the questionee through their systemic (and usually unconscious)  decision issues that need to be managed before any change can happen.

3. Facilitative Questions do not pull data and are not based on any curiousity of the questioner. Their intent is to lead the questionee through their unconscious decision issues that need to be addressed and recognized  in order to not disrupt the status quo.

4. Facilitative Questions yield very different responses than conventional questions which pull data from decisions already made. Facilitative Questions lead the listener through decision making channels toward a new resolution or a reweighting of values.

5. Posing/formulating Facilitative Questions takes some thinking in that they must help the questioner figure out all of the elements included in their status quo and to notice what’s missing so they can discover excellence. Facilitative Questions actually teach the questioner how to think and recognize how and why they need to change.

An open question would be: “Why do you wear your hair like that?” The question is gathering data about a decision the questionee has already made and understands.

A Facilitative Question would be: “How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle?” The question leads the quesionee through past haircuts, current lifestyle choices, time, obligations, current hairdressers/stylists, and any biases the questionee might have about his/her appearance. It actually uses brain function to pull various decision points out of the unconscious brain so they become conscious and the  questionee can get a good look at choices s/he may not have recognized.

These questions can be used in:

• marketing, to make an ad interactive; example: How would you know when it was time to buy a luxury car?
• coaching, to help the coachee decide how to change within their unique value structure; example: what would you need to know or believe differently in order to be willing to add a new habit to your daily tooth care?
• change management/implementation, to help folks buy-in to proposed change and become part of the solution; example: What would you all need to shift in order to be willing to bring in this new initiative in a way that would maintain your agreed-upon work-life values?
• sales, to help buyers figure out the internal decision issues they must address so that all people, relationships, policies, rules, etc. get addressed and bought-in to any proposed solution prior to deciding on a solution or vendor. example: How would you and your decision team know when it was time to add another resource to what you are currently doing? 

I hope this helps. In my new book Dirty Little Secrets you can read more about them.

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Facilitative Questions are NOT open questions is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Here is a complete definition of Buying Facilitation®:
Buying Facilitation® is a decision facilitation skill that acts as an unbiased GPS tool to assist buyers in navigating through their unique, behind-the-scenes change issues to ensure they get the buy-in necessary to bring in a new solution.

I named my model Buying Facilitation® because it’s precisely what we need to be doing in addition to selling: helping buyers facilitate the internal, off-line, behind-the-scenes, personal decision process that we are not privy to. It manages that important meeting between colleagues over lunch, the fight that needs to be resolved between department heads before budgets can be used, the political issues that will get the right folks to meetings, that the right considerations and implementation concerns are on the agenda. We are indeed helping facilitate the buying decision, but it’s core is change management. It’s the stuff that often has nothing to do with need or solution. And the stuff that sales methods don’t address, yet needs to happen before buyers can go ahead with any purchase.

Buyers must manage their off-line, politically-driven change issues before they can consider making a purchase even if they have a need that is an absolute fit with a seller’s solution. (How many times have you seen the perfect client fail to buy? This is why.) Sales manages the tail end of the buying decision – the solution end.  Buying Facilitation® manages the off-line, internal decision end… with a very different skill set and outcome than sales. Sellers sometimes have a hard time with this concept because they are still thinking ’sales.’ But both models are necessary. We’ve just never had access to skills that help buyers navigate through the private stuff that goes on without us, while we sit and wait.

I asked my colleague David Deans who recently wrote a blog post that used the term ‘buyer facilitation’  if he’d give me his definition: “The context in which I use the words buyer, seller, guidance, enablement or facilitation together is totally generic in nature — relative to the traditional commercial buying-cycle.” David is speaking about guiding and enabling the buyer at the solution end of the decision. In that context, buyer facilitation helps the sellers manage the placement of the solution, and how the solution will be accepted and chosen to fill the need: in relation to other vendors, price, solutions, and solution/need fit. In other words, it’s a more specific word for sales.

HOW BUYING FACILITATION® WAS CONCEIVED

For those of you having difficulty understanding the difference between Buying Facilitation® and sales or buyER facilitation, or trying to use sales thinking instead of change management thinking, let me tell you specifically, and in far greater detail than you ever wanted to know, what I’m doing here. And for those of you who find yourself falling asleep, please feel free to stop reading. This is a level of detail I rarely, if ever, share. When I teach sellers how to do Buying Facilitation®, I make it much easier :)

Buying Facilitation® is a GPS navigation tool that gives buyers navigation capability to both recognize and manage the unconscious decision issues they need to address before making a decision for a purchase or change. Ultimately (net/net) we are teaching all of the possibly unrecognized folks who might touch the ‘need’ or solution how to buy-in, to choose our solution where and if possible – a sort of  ‘influencing with integrity.’ Using it, we speed up the sales cycle exponentially, discover prospects we wouldn’t have discovered, have prospects buy who didn’t realize they had a need. We are not focusing on ‘need’ or ’solution’ or ‘relationship,’  but on the internal stuff that only insiders know about. The personal stuff that makes our buyers disappear for so long. The policitcal stuff that makes good prospects never come back.

Here are details of Buying Facilitation® skills:

1. Managing Internal Decision Making: I’ve coded the 3 phases all decisions go through as they go from unconscious to conscious, strategic to tactical. Everyone uses these decision phases, regardless of  the type of decision, whether it’s conscious or not, and whether it’s a personal or group decisions. These phases are written about in detail in my book Dirty Little Secrets.

2. Managing How Appropriate Factors Get Considered: Different from conventional questions that pull data, Facilitative Questions pull unconscious criteria from where it’s ’stored’ in the brain (indexes, or indicies), using the proper words to ensure that the appropriate considerations are taken into account. To formulate Facilitative Questions demands the questioner listen for systems, not content, and be unbiased – biased only by the knowledge of systems and decision phases. Why is this necessary? Because people must pull together all of their conscious and unconscious criteria before making a decision; the time it takes them to do this is the length of the sales cycle. They need to do this anyway (We never make decisions that go against our values.). In sales, Facilitative Questions illuminate internal, private decision issues (people, policies, problems, vendor issues, money issues, alternate solution choices, rules, history, etc) that need to buy-in to any change (a solution or vendor choice for example).

3. Managing How People Recognize All Options: Presumptive Summaries help with the thinking process. They bring together the underlying messages that are a critical part of their thinking. These do not just summarize the content. They actually make conscious some unconscious choices.

4. Managing How Sellers Become GPS Systems And Change Agents: No one has ever taught us how to listen for systems. But this skill enables the seller (or coach or influencer) to formulate the Facilitative Questions and Presumptive Summaries without bias.

As you can see, the skills of Buying Facilitation® are all based on being a neutral navigator to help Others manage the political, personal, and sometimes crazy private decisions they must address before being willing to change… regardless of their need! They have always done this off-line, behind-the-scenes; sellers have never been privy to this.

Hopefully, you can now recognize the two different skill sets, with two different results: Buying Facilitation® manages the unconscious, internal decision issues to efficiently get buy-in for change and solution choice; and sales manages the need, the solution, and the solution placement.

I hope I didn’t bore you.  But I hope that you now understand the difference between Buying Facilitation® and buyer facilitation, between being a GPS system to navigate private systems choices without bias, and sales which understands need and places solutions. I’m happy to start a discussion here, or contact me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

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There is still time to get the freebies for: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Check out the site for more details.

Or consider purchasing the bundle: Dirty Little Secrets plus my last book Buying Facilitation®: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. These books were written to be read together, as they offer the full complement of concepts to help you learn and understand Buying Facilitation® - the new skill set that gives you the ability to lead buyers through their buying decisions. You still get the freebies with the bundle order.

Buying Facilitation® vs. buyer facilitation is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I’m here to denounce the myth that they are good in all instances: I actually believe they are used most effectively at the back end of the selling/buying cycle and have no role to play in the buying decision activity that occurs before buyers make their solution choice.

Let’s first consider why they are used at all. Questions, in and of themselves, create parameters for the questioned person. So if i asked you what you had for breakfast, you couldn’t tell me about a trip to visit your Mom. Questions effectively set the boundaries for your answer.

Open Questions give the questioned person a large field to answer in, making it possible for the person to think fully and expansively. In the field of sales, Open Questions are used to have prospects/buyers ‘open up’ and ’spill the beans’ so that sellers can gather the data they need to know to sell better. The word I hear a lot from sellers is that they want the prospect to ‘REVEAL.’

These questions help sellers ‘understand’ the buyer. The belief here is that if the seller TRULY understands what is going on – with the problem that needs to be resolved, with the way the decisions are being made, with how they are choosing vendors, with past problems that surround the ‘need’ – s/he will be able to sell/pitch/present better.

So….. does it work? Have Open Questions increased your sales? Has ‘knowing’ who the decision makers are gotten more sales, faster? Has ‘understanding’ the problem increased your close rate? I don’t think so.

WHY OUR CURRENT BELIEFS ABOUT OPEN QUESTIONS ARE SPECIOUS

I believe that there are two very distinct elements in a buying decision: 1. the private,  internal, off-line systems issues they must address that rarely have anything specifically to do with the ‘need’, and are managed in a way that must conform to their idiosyncratic norms – their relationships, Buying Decision Team needs, initiatives, future outcomes; 2. the choice of the best route to resolve a problem (includes solution, provider, price, and implementation). Sales very nicely manages #2. We sit and wait while they do #1 on their own and hope they’ll come back and buy.

We use Open Questions in #2. The problem is that when we first meet our clients, it’s too early for them to know the complete, nuanced, answers to our questions – not in the detail they will know at the end of their buying decision process. They most probably have not en-massed their entire Buying Decision Team, or seen how some elements of the ‘problem’ must fit with other in-house issues, or fully defined their solution needs.

Our perfectly fine questions are being asked way too early.

One of the ‘dirty little secrets’ in my new book is that when buyers begin their search for a solution, they have little idea of the route they will end up taking on the way to choosing a solution: They don’t always know all of the people who end up needing to be involved, or how/if their regular vendors can handle the situation, or how the tech team will react, or if another department can help them with parts of the solution.

What is discussed in those off-line discussions and negotiations that happen between department heads over lunch? Or the meetings with the tech team to see if they can resolve the situation? Or the conversations with the present vendor? Until or unless buyers do these things, they can’t buy. And Open Questions do nothing to help them. Open Questions are for the seller, and the information we gather does not help close the sale at this point in the buying decision cycle.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS

The problem is that the main elements involved in buying decisions happen behind-the-scenes and are not based on our solution, and generally not even based on ’need’ (which I call an Identified Problem). So we end up asking Open Questions far too early for them to have good data to share.

I’ve developed something called a Facilitative Question that pulls together subconscious criteria (i.e. not information based) and acts like a flashlight to lead the buyer step-by-step down the path they must go through as they muddle through their internal decisioning issues. It’s actually a decision facilitation tool, not a sales tool.

Because the issues that buyers must address first are so private (not to mention a mystery as they begin discovery of the people and policies they must include in decisions) we cannot be there when they do these things. But we can teach the buyer how to discover their route and bring together the right people. This may not ‘reveal’ but it certainly puts us on the Buying Decision Team. Would you rather ‘know’ how they buy (which you can’t anyway because you’re an outsider, you’re not there, don’t know all of the players, and have no history the problem), or be on the team that helps make the decisions?

Facilitative Questions often start with ‘What’ and follow the decision phases that brains go through as they change: What has stopped you from losing those 10 pounds, and what would you need to be considering differently in order to know when it’s time to do so? At what point would you be choosing people to enlist on your health routine to get you where you want to be? We may be selling a gym membership, but until the person answers all of those internal questions for themselves, all the data we gather about their fitness, or what we share about the gym, won’t get them to buy.

My new book, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, coming out October 15, is all about the inner life of the buying cycle and how decisions get made to buy, to change, to solve a problem. Add this thinking – along with Facilitative Questions – to the front end of your Open Questions, and you’ll have a complete model to use to truly help buyers buy, help people change (i.e. use in your coaching), and help in a negotiation.

How would you know that adding a new skill set to the one you’re currently using would enhance your results?

And, what is stopping you from closing all of the sales you deserve to close?

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If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

Check out my new book coming out October 15: Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it. Read two free chapters. Sign up for presales deals, and announcements.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that inluences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

Why Open Questions Don’t Work is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Let’s look at it this way: if a buyer’s buying decision were a 3 inch line, the sales piece would be the last 1/2 inch. Let me  give you an example with the client I blogged about yesterday. 

Good Practice sells a wonderful JIT on-line learning tool. If they approach a university as a prospect, there are several problems that the university would have to handle prior to considering bringing in an additional learning solution or a new provider:

1. the university has a learning and development department offers employees blended learning material for the employees: there is competition for eyeballs and budget; there are ego issues re developing new material.
2. the university has an HR department that oversees what material is given to employees, how budget is spent, who is on the decision team to invite in new providers or seek new solutions; they define the terms to ensure suppliers meet the rigor of their academic standards and the needs of the staff.
3. even more than budget, universities have, um, interesting time lines that drag on forever while different groups form and reform, initiatives are completed one at a time, and people shift their jobs.
4. these folks have really good tech departments that just love designing new programs.

In other words, their internal system is relatively incomprehensible (even to themselves) and sometimes in competition. Until or unless they are able to manage all of the above internal factors, it makes no sense to pitch a product or discuss need. And an outsider is not privy to, or part of, these discussions. But they can be with Buying Facilitation®.

BUYING FACILITATION® SEQUENCES AND CLARIFIES INTERNAL DECISION MAKING

Buying Facilitation® helps them sequentially pull together all of the above issues so they can look at their possibilities, weigh what they have now against some future excellence, figure out how to bring together all of their decision points, and see what they need from outside vs. what they can do themselves. But it’s based on the buyer’s definition of excellence – not ours. And sometimes, they want to do it all themselves but may discover they cannot.

Re this last point, one of our Facilitative Questions to these university groups is:

What is stopping you and your tech folks from designing the sort of JIT online learning tools that will give your managers the type of skills they need to achieve the excellence they seek?

This is asked about 1/3 the way down the sequential Funnel: if the tech team thinks it has the time and bandwidth to design new tools, they will not bring in anyone from outside to do it.

Instead of directing a conversation around ‘need’ or ’solution’ – which is absolutely necessary AFTER they’ve made their internal decisions and gotten buy-in from HR and L&D and the tech team - Buying Facilitation® teaches them FIRST how to: get internal buy-in for adding a new solution, bring together a Buying Decision Team, figure out what excellence looks like, and resolve internal issues on their own…but with us on their Team.

They have to do this anyway, and the time it takes them to do it is the length of the sales cycle. Plus, I’d rather be on their team as they decide. If they can do it all on their own, they wouldn’t have bought me anyway and I can save myself months of follow-on conversations and have served them.

We have always sat and waited for buyers to do this behind-the-scenes stuff. And sales doesn’t manage it. With Buying Facilitation®, we can do this WITH them – and THEN we can sell.

My new book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it is about the systems involved in a buying decision, and the change management involved. Hang in there: it will be out October 1. In the meantime you may want to look at 2 free chapters from the ebook Buying Facilitation® that partners the new book.

It’s been an interesting 20 years, talking about decision facilitation in the field of sales, with sales focusing on solution placement. What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add a new skill set to the one you’re already using?

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Buying Facilitation® Comes Before Sales is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

(Facilitative Questions don’t gather data: they help the brain think and are used in  sequence to how brains decide. Example: How would you know when it was time to reconsider your hairstyle? teaches the brain how to think about When, If, Why, How, Who needs to be in the consideration process.)

and use conventional questions just to gather/share data, I recognize how important even conventional questions are in the sales process. So many sales people use questions manipulatively, as a way to open up the conversation so their solution will be an obvious answer.

Duane Sparks, developer of Action Selling, owner of  The Sales Board (www.actionselling.com), cares about questions. He has a series of books that examine the aspect of questions: The Answer to Sales, Selling your Price, Masters of Loyalty, and Sales Strategy

Here is what Duane responded when I asked him about the importance of questions:
“Questioning is the heart and soul of my work.  And, the thing that I place the most emphasis upon in the sales process.  Today, in my opinion, it is the most artful part of the work that we do as salespeople.  It has long ago replaced “gabbing” as the key characteristic of the effective salesperson.  Mastery of Questioning is a life-long objective for those of us who get this at a deep level.

I believe that we earn the right to ask deep level Questions by asking entry level questions.  Since most salespeople have the skills to ask entry level questions, I have focused on training salespeople on how to ask advanced, high-gain type of questions. ”

While I look forward to the possibility of having Duane add the use of some powerful Facilitative Questions that will help buyers recognize all of the buying criteria they need to address, and actually teach them how to bring aboard the rest of the buying decision team to help buying decisions get made quickly and with integrity, I want to complement Duane on his commitment to questions. Too few folks in sales are targeting their time on finding customers, influencing them, closing them, yadayada, and not enough on truly caring about their customers.

Duane is one of the good guys in sales. Take a look at his books, his assessment tools, his online programs, and his tips. You’ll learn a lot about the integrity of managing the solution placement end of the buying decision funnel.

Why Are Questions Important? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

‘How are you currently training your sales folks?’ I asked.

“We’re not. We bring them together once a month, discuss product, and complain about not closing sales. And give each other advice.”

‘How is that working in terms of the results you’re getting? It must be working well or you wouldn’t be doing it.’ I continued.

“Sure. We’re doing our numbers, and have been reaching them consistently for years. So we’re fine.”

‘And, out of curiosity, what has stopped you from buying from Joe and actually adding some new skills training somewhere along the way?” I asked.

“My boss doesn’t believe it in. He says that we’re doing ok, and why fix something that isn’t broken. I’ve tried to convince him that we need some new skills, but he won’t hear of it. I got on the call this morning with you to see if you could call him and convince him.”

‘I can’t convince anyone – especially people who don’t think they have a need and see no problem with what they are doing. If he actively wanted to speak with me I could help him expand his range of choices. But first, I’m curious about why you’ve stayed in a relationship with Joe, and discussed the possibility of  hiring him to do a sales training with you if you knew you couldn’t buy any training from him,’ I said.

“We like each other. We’re in a relationship. Plus, you never know. We might get lucky.”

“And,” my client added, “I can tell he has a need, and I have the perfect solution, and I know they have money. I want to be there when his boss changes his mind.”

The Buyer Must Recognize A Need To Change

How many sales people are doing a ‘relationship’ sale, spending time learning about ‘need’ and ‘decision makers’, and pitching product, until the buyer ‘is ready’?  And then sitting and waiting, hoping the sale will close?

Using Buying Facilitation and Facilitative Questions, prospects can be led to recognize a need that they hadn’t recognized, or recognize the action steps they need to take en route to Excellence, or discover who else needs to  buy-in to choose a solution to purchase. A couple of generic examples taken out of their normal  sequencing:

How would you know when adding new skills would give you the results you deserve?

or

At what point would you consider adding new skills to the ones your folks are already using successfully?

Facilitative Questions, used correctly, might open up possibilities that didn’t originally occur to the prospect. But they are not using ‘convincing’ or any form of manipulation; they merely are a series of sequenced thinking guides that help the person recognize what they need to consider as they discover if new decisions are necessary.

Convincer strategies, charm, good information, and possible ‘need’ don’t help someone decide something different. And until someone recognizes the desire to have something they don’t, and the internal system/environment (the people, the way they run their business, etc.) is ready, willing, able to bring in something new, nothing will happen. No matter the need that we recognize. And ‘convincing’ is useless: we’ve tried for decades to ‘understand need’ and ‘be right’ and all it has gotten us is a 90% failure rate.

If Joe used Buying Facilitation, he could have facilitated a different conversation with his boss – and helped the boss work through any issues he had about what success might look like with additional skills. He even could have helped him work through his own ego issues (How would you know that an additional skill set would add to what you’re already doing so successfully, without compromising all of the hard work you’ve done?). But trying to convince, trying to offer rational details and reasons when the other person has their own version of reality, just doesn’t work.

Stop selling. Help the buyer decide how to buy based on their own mysterious criteria – not on the need you perceive that they have. It’s not about you or the need. It’s not about you understanding their criteria. It’s about you doing something totally different from selling: truly facilitating their own discovery of their buying criteria, and recognizing the elements they must address as they change. It’s a systems issue, not a need issue.

To learn more about facilitating buying decisions from the standpoint of the stages buyers must go through before a buying decision, go to: www.newsalesparadigm.com and see if anything there will help you learn more. As always, we’re here to answer your questions about how Buying Facilitation can be added to your sales skills and help you close more sales.

Also, have a look at this week’s posts. On a myriad of topics, the blog will give you the tools to do business with integrity.

A ‘Need’ Doesn’t Mean A Buying Decision is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I have a few thoughts here:

1. Why is the manager delegating his/her responsibility for employee/salesperson success to an outsider who s/he doesn’t know and has no authority over?
2. Great! That means the manager isn’t biased around the route to success so long as the salesperson is successful;
3. The manager is replacing or blending group sales training with individual skills enhancement to give each seller the ability to discover their own favored model for learning and success;
4. The manager should be a co-sponsor, and fund the endeavor as soon as the seller starts to bring in addition revenue and enhanced results;
5. The manager should be part of the final session to ensure s/he can follow up and continue the work of the coach, and understand how best to supervise the coachee to ensure the learning gets carried forward.

The only downside I can see to individual sales coaching is that a sales rep’s new approach might conflict with the company brand, and if the manger has been out of the process, s/he might not recognize potential problems until too late. Not to mention that the sales manager may not be able to supervise appropriately when each seller is doing their own thing.

But as a coach, I’m happy. It gives me a chance to work with dedicated professionals who are actively seeking growth and change and are ready, willing, and able to learn/grow.

If this is indeed a trend, I am delighted: it tells me that the sales profession is finally recognizing the individuation of sellers, and allowing people to discover their own unique routes to success. And it should give the company greater success when sellers are able to follow their own styles and communication patterns and don’t need to fit into a possibly uncomfortable mold.

I’m more concerned that the field of coaching may not be ready to accept all this responsibility, however.

In fact, while sales coaching can be highly effective (as long as the seller acquires sound, replicable skills, and the seller gets weaned from the coach in a reasonable time period), some coaching I’ve seen makes me jittery. Some coaches use the coaching relationship as a vehicle to offer ‘advice’, based on the coach’s view of  ‘excellence’ and based on the coach’s ‘success’ in similar circumstances. In other words, the seller gets to be a clone of the coach.

WHAT IS COACHING

Let’s step back for a moment and understand what coaching is – and can be.

‘Coaching’ is a relatively new term used to describe a one-on-one relationship in which one person is meant to guide another into excellence. In fact, coaching is the new word for consulting – consulting for individuals. And, like with consultants, there is no way to know with certainty, before you begin, if one coach would be better for you than another no matter how good the referral or reputation.

Many consultants have a history of having worked with major consulting firms, so have a discernable track record. When we hire someone who has been a partner at KPMG, for example, we know we will get someone who has a background in accounting, working with large corporations, and who follows a rather linear, strategic approach to change management. Someone who has been a VP at a bank has other qualities commensurate with their work history and banking industry knowledge. But what about all of those new names floating around who have not been associated with a branded employer? And if someone has a good reputation, what does that mean for us, specifically?

While there certainly are a few governing bodies around, and a few programs that teach coaching, most coaches I know are not licensed and have had no specific training in how to ‘coach’ per se. They just deem themselves good at what they do, advertise their expertise, put a price on their heads, and hope enough people will show up to keep them gainfully employed.

Indeed, there is no way of knowing how you will ‘connect’ with a coach – even one with a great reputation – until you have already had one or two sessions.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT COACH FOR YOU

Here are a few recommendations to help you choose the most appropriate coach, help alleviate the downside, and maximize the upside.

1. Write down a list of exactly what you want to walk away with. This will change as you learn and grow, but it’s good to have an initial goal. Something like: learn how to close better/faster; or determine high-quality prospects on the first call. You can also add some skills here – like, learn to listen better; or develop better relationships. This is the easiest part of your homework.
2. Begin to grapple with the type of interactivity you want to have. Should it be a Q&A with the coach giving you answers so you could walk away with things to do? Do you want the coach to listen to a particular situation and lead you through actions to a specific goal? Do you strictly want advice?Do you want to learn new skills? Have the coach do interventions on apparent deficiencies (i.e. you may be listening only for a prospect’s ‘content’ cues rather than recognizing their unspoken metamessages, leading to faulty interpretations and wasted time), and teach you new choices? Are you ready to learn where you are less than successful, and may need to change, to garner greater success? Are you ready to change?
3. The type of coach you require depends on the type of change you seek, and the level of trust you’re willing to impart. People who work with me expect me to use my decision facilitation model and lead them through any ineffective communication patterns that keep them from being excellent communication partners and decision strategists. People who choose coaches who have been consultants in large corporations get led through strategic approaches that incorporate the knowledge of job descriptions and responsibilities of different levels of people, internal decision makers and how they operate, and how to work with ‘internal coaches’ to achieve success. Each coach has a different style. What do you want to achieve? And what type of relationship will help you get there?

The point here is that when you enter into a relationship with a coach, you must understand the criteria you’ll use, to give you the best chance of getting your needs met.

I see my job as that of a Neutral Navigator, leading people through their own unique change process, to have them discover, choose, or learn the right skills to use at the right time. Other coaches see their jobs as high level consultants who work alongside their coachees and tell them what is going on – and what needs to happen – each step of the way.

COACHING FOR CHANGE VS. COACHING FOR ACTIVITY

Of course, there are certainly times it’s necessary for me to give advice, especially when folks need a few Facilitative Questions to help clients make decisions. But I deeply believe that people possess most of their own answers as well as very competent, usable skills: they just don’t always recognize when to use one skill over another, and sometimes end up using a great skill at the wrong time.

Here’s an example of taking a highly effective skill from a personal situation and transferring it into a selling situation. Let’s work with a client’s annoyance at a prospect’s objection. I would ask my client to compare how she heard that objection versus how she might ‘hear’ a small child tell her of an incident at school. I’d have her then recognize the difference in how she listens in each situation, and lead her to discover how to listen with the same ‘ear’ that she listens to a child with, and see if that changes the choices she’ll have with her prospect. Ultimately, she would end up being able to choose the best listening filter for every communication.

Not everyone wants to go through this sort of process, nor is it relevant in every situation. And some people only want to walk away with a recipe of ‘to dos’.

As you go about the process of choosing a coach, make your best guess as to how will you know, before you begin, which coach would be flexible through time, through contexts, through change. It’s vital that you ask yourself these questions before choosing a coach.

AN EXAMPLE OF COLLABORATIVE SALES COACHING

The foundation of my coaching style is the belief that people exhibit the same communication issues with me as they do with their other communication partners, and we can use our relationship as a model for change. It’s real, it’s real-time, and when something happens between us that I notice as being potentially harmful in a collaborative decision making communication (one of the skills necessary for helping buyers make buying decisions) my client can learn new choices and make any learning mistakes with ME prior to going out and trying the new skills on their prospects and clients.

In my personal belief system, if I continually tell my clients what to do, I’m giving them fish rather than teaching them how to fish. And when I can help folks learn new skills, the skills become a part of their unique style and personality. I’ve just provided the vehicle for learning.

To give you a model of one sort of coaching, I’ll walk you through one of my recent sessions with a new client. Use it as a way to help you consider your own comfort zone and to get clarity on your criteria for choosing the best coach for you.

Prior to our first session, my client sent me a long missive, requesting a list of Facilitative Questions for some complex prospecting calls to “C” level execs. The email contained several pages of types of clients, types of situations, all with requests for input from me.

“Is there a specific reason you decided to send this to me prior to our call?” I asked, as soon as we began, wondering what was behind the missive, curious as to why he didn’t want to wait to discuss the material together, and wondering if he expected me to do a certain amount of homework on his behalf prior to our call.

“I like to have some sort of control over my calls, to know where a call is going to end up and to make sure I would walk away with exactly what I need. I was just taking care of myself.”

“Do you always do that sort of thing?”

“As often as I can.”

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes the call gets away from me and the other person takes over, and then I don’t know how to get it back to where I want it.”

“And how do you know the difference – before you go into ‘control’ mode – between when it will give you what you want, when it won’t, and when it will make the situation worse?”

“I have no idea.”

And so we started our first coaching session.

Much of our session was about his need to have control – what I call an “I Space” (defined as a communication directed toward getting your own needs met without considering the effects on the communication partner or the overall communication), which is very different from a “We Space” (in which both communication partners work toward a Win Win) – over his communication partner.

We then discovered the beliefs he’d need to expand in order to add ‘Win-Win communications’ as a behavioral choice. I didn’t want to suggest he stop trying to wield control. I just wanted him to know the difference between when it would be successful and when it wouldn’t, and have another choice when necessary.

I gave him homework to help him begin to differentiate between the times he
would naturally gravitate toward using control tactics and the gentle, collaborative choices he usually made in his personal life in similar circumstances. From there we built in alternative skills to use for when he recognized the need of a new choice.

In the last fifteen minutes of the call, I gave him some Facilitative Questions for an upcoming conference call with a group of senior partners. We also agreed that in the future, we’d allocate the ‘change’ portion to one half the call, and the ‘to do’ portion in the other half.

KNOW YOUR COMFORT LEVEL

Not every coach works this way. Nor does every coachee want to make personal changes. Working with the type of change that uncovers possibly hidden issues is risky and uncomfortable and takes coach/client trust, coach skill, and client courage.

Whatever the parameters will be, you must be as clear as possible prior to choosing a coach, and get agreement on your preferred working arrangement on the first conversation. And because you’ll sometimes need to shift gears, make sure you have a coach who is flexible enough to be able to offer different types of communication styles.

And, your most important criteria for choosing a coach is your comfort level around change. How much change can you handle? Would you rather be given answers? What would you need answers for, and what would you be willing to go through the change process for? It’s vital that you be honest with yourself here so you can choose the coach to help you achieve your goals.

In summary, your coaching relationship will only be as effective as the clarity of your initial criteria. It’s important to know the difference between when you’re on course and when it’s time to shift. And recognize quickly if the coach you’re working with is not meeting your criteria, and be willing to have a discussion to shift the communication to better meet your needs. In the coaching situation, it’s really all about you.

Sales Coaching: Choosing the right coach. Targeting the right outcome. is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Until now, our communication rules have assumed that when we kindly or persuasively offer others good information that could solve problems and achieve successful results, or coach them toward making a much-needed change, or even just pitch a product they sorely need, we can expect a positive reception. Obviously, if our communication partner (called Partner in this article) has a problem and we’ve got the true solution – and we do! We do! – they should take our advice. But they don’t.

We watch our Partners nod their heads in agreement with our clever suggestions, and promise to do something different, but then quickly return to their old less-successful behaviors.

DISCOVERING THE PROBLEM VS. SUPPLYING THE SOLUTION
When we offer our Partners seemingly obvious solutions and expect them to change, we are failing to take into account their need to make comprehensive systems decisions first. Indeed, our Partners need to recognize and manage all aspects of their presenting problem before they can make sense of our suggestions. But it’s not so easy as we think.

Let me make up a silly analogy using an iceberg: we all see the tip; but if an iceberg engineer (I’m obviously making this up) needs to move the iceberg, he can’t until/unless he understands its size, shape, weight, as well as weather conditions, sea conditions, and its course of travel. Until the whole iceberg is measured and a new location is found, the tip ain’t movin’.

There is so much more to influencing choices than we initially recognize.

Of course, our Partner’s presenting problem seems obvious to us, especially when we’ve been in business a while and have seen it all so often. But the full ramifications of the problem – all of the elements that it contains, all of the legs it has to-and-from the rest of the Partner’s environment, all of the beliefs and constructs that maintain the problem – are quite hidden.

And until or unless the client understands and resolves all of the elements that created and maintains the problem, she won’t know how to make a change. She might act differently for a bit when she intellectually understands the reasons to adopt new behaviors. But if the complete set of issues aren’t understood, managed, and accounted for, permanent change will not occur.

INFORMATION DOESN’T HELP PEOPLE CHANGE
Too often, sellers of change focus their drive toward change around rational, proven facts, generally accepted knowledge, or unique data – all of which I am labeling ‘information’. While information is necessary, and will be useful at some point later in the decision cycle, there is no way early on for people to know what to do with it. It’s akin to explaining to the iceberg engineer all of the dynamics of the moving crane before he’s sized up the components of the iceberg, the weather, or the sea.

It’s difficult to understand that accurate information is not enough to warrant change: people just end up resisting.

This problem shows up when buyers take too long to purchase. Or when people don’t heed our advice and continue on doing the same-old, same-old, complaining fervently of an unresolved problem. It seems curious for us to see their problem so clearly, and have a viable solution, and then be ignored, while the Partners continue to muddle along with the same problems.

But a note of caution: it’s not our job to understand or fix our Partner’s problems although we’d sure like to. It’s not our job to know what our Partner needs. The Partner must effectively manage all of the elements within their existent system before change can occur. Once they do this, as part of a facilitation process of painstaking discovery you can lead them through, they can develop all the necessary criteria for designing a unique solution; as support folk, we then just supply it. So much easier than us trying to create a solution based on a small segment of data.

I recently got a call from a young woman in a large recruitment company. She wanted to know how I would train 3000 people.
“What criteria are you using to know if they’ve been successfully trained?”
“We just want a training program. We’re talking with several different groups, and want to know what you can do for us.”
“But all programs don’t offer the same things, and your sales staff would learn different skills from each program.”
“Well, we want you to tell us what’s different about yours so we know and we can compare.”
“But what are you comparing if you don’t know your criteria?”

I then used Facilitative Questions to help her determine her success criteria. Here’s what she came up with:

1. differentiation from the competition;
2. loyalty and trust created from each interaction;
3. a ‘true’ consultative approach in which the seller helps the buyer understand and solve her own business problems;
4. consistent skills among all sales staff;
5. creation of value through each interaction.

Once we discovered the criteria, it became clear that Buying Facilitation would work for her. But until then, she wouldn’t have known how to discern one program from another since ‘sales training’ meant something unique to her that I had no of understanding without making guesses.

SYSTEMS
Let’s digress here to underscore the importance of ‘systems’, which are the elements of the Partner’s company that must be managed before change can take place.

People and groups of people possess unique, internal elements, or ‘systems’: they operate through certain beliefs; hold religious or personal or company values; collaborate with others (family, partners, vendors, colleagues) with whom they have another set of beliefs and values; work/live with rules, politics, and norms; have hopes and dreams, fears and regrets. In business there are often vendor or multinational relationships that alter the fact pattern. Indeed, all of us have very unique mind-sets, compounded when there are several people within the system, such as families or business colleagues. And these elements – which I’m labeling ’systems’ – cause and create the Partner’s landscape.

People/teams are generally unaware that their problems are a direct result of the mix of these very idiosyncratic systems issues. It’s the system itself, in the precise way it exists, that has created the problem situation.  Indeed, whatever is going on actually looks and feels ‘normal’ cuz that’s the way it’s always been. It’s only when a significant problem crops up that people look beyond the conscious-comfortable status quo.

As outsiders, there is no way we can address, manage, or alter those unique internal issues. We just see the results of the decisions made: there is no appropriate training program in place; the person is overweight and facing serious illness; the employee comes in late every day; 20 people are working from a server that handles 5 people.

A solution looks obvious to us; even when a needs-analysis is done it often looks like our solution would solve the problem (see newsletter #51 – Needs Analysis: who is it for?). But no matter how smart we are as outsiders, no matter how much we can see, no matter how right we are, we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

THE TWO STAGES OF DECISION MAKING
Let’s start with one of my basic premises:

Information does not teach people how to make a new decision.

Since most of us use information transfer as a way to instigate change, let me offer you my rationale for the above statement: unless our Partners address and manage their internal systems issues before seeking a solution, they face the prospect of upsetting any elements that hold the status quo together. In fact, there might be chaos if change is not managed appropriately.

In our iceberg analogy, that means until the engineer understands what he’s got to move where, understands the depth and mass of the ice, and understands the water factors, he faces possible destruction of the iceberg if he tries to move it with only knowledge of the tip.

So there is an up-front set of decisions that need to get made in order to consider doing something new, and a secondary set of decisions to determine an appropriate solution.

In the first stage of decisioning – the choice to make a new decision by managing all internal variables – there are three distinct, sequential phases that all people and teams go through and which must be resolved (consciously or unconsciously) before a final decision can be made. In fact, each of these phases are carried out (consciously or not) in every decision made, whether it’s a simple or a complex decision, or a decision made by an individual, a group, a family, or a company.

1. What’s missing and how did it get missing;
2. How can we fix that with familiar resources;
3. What are the full range of internal variables that need to be recognized and addressed before a new solution can actually be embraced.

1. Where are we? What’s missing? – Recognizing, understanding, and managing the complex issues.

Our Partners must be able to examine the full extent of the elements of the problem and acutely recognize (I mean deeply understand) what’s missing that is creating the problem at hand. Does this sound simple?

How many of us, given all the time in the world to sit down and think, can actually recognize all the elements in play that have gotten us where we are, not to mention what might be missing from our potentially comfortable status quo?

Think of something about yourself that you don’t particularly like: your penchant for procrastinating? Your push to work harder rather than take time with your family? The way you speak to people sometimes or your inability to really listen if you’re distracted? Your forgetfulness?

We all have annoying habits or behaviors that we either try to hide, or wish we could fix. And even when we’ve tried to fix them, they don’t stay fixed. Why? It’s actually difficult from an up-close-and-personal standpoint to fully recognize, understand, or pinpoint all of the elements that have generated and maintained this quirk. It all just ‘is’, and has grown into comfort.

If seeing ourselves clearly is that difficult for us, how can we expect others to have an easier time?

Following this thinking, the main idea here is that only your communication partner – your client, your prospect, your employee – can know the full range of elements she is willing to address, not you. It is faulty for us to think it’s our job to understand (so we can offer our solution?). Our jobs are to help our Partner understand by asking the facilitative questions that will direct them to their own solutions.

2. Fix problems with known resources – Seeking to fix what is already there, or find familiar vendors/sources of change management.

The next piece of the puzzle is that systems try to self-correct. Even when it’s painfully obvious that there is a problem that needs to be solved, the first place that people or teams go to fix it is internal: they end up going back to those same systems that created the problem, hoping for a different outcome.

Of course that’s insanity, but until they at least make the effort, they won’t consider a solution outside of their comfort zone. Our training doesn’t work? Let’s tweak it. I’m overweight? All I have to do is stop eating ice cream every day, and I’ll start today – uh, tomorrow.

One of the problems we have as change agents is that we actually believe people or clients want us to help them change at the moment they come to us to fix their problem. They are only attempting to get ideas to use so they can fix their own problem.

3. Manage all internal variables so no chaos will occur through change – pinpointing the actual ideas/people/initiatives/decisions that would need to buy-in to any changes.

It’s only when people truly understand that they’ll need a solution that’s unfamiliar – possibly uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncontrollable – that they sit down to truly make sense of all of the issues they need to manage in order to make a change that won’t wreak havoc on their status quo.

Until or unless all of the internal criteria that created and maintain the problem are recognized, and a route is designed in which they can manage an efficient change progression throughout their system, people won’t change. That means having the prospect address relationship, financial, people, historic, branding, belief, and (especially) political issues – whatever they see as elements within the larger system that maintain the current fact pattern. Let me say again, that as an outsider you will never fully understand what is going on. Your job is to support your partners through their own discovery and solution creation.

NEW JOB
The jobs of sellers, coaches and supervisors must now shift to include a decision support model on the front end. The Buying/Decision Facilitation Method is a method that leads people through the components of their decisions so they can recognize the systems elements they need to address and resolve. Our roles are to be neutral navigators who chart the course of discovery.

This will bring the following results:

1. what needs to get changed will be recognized and acknowledged quickly.
2. decisions get made with all elements included and our Partner knows she has all answers for her solution;
3. all decision partners are brought into the problem/solution within a few hours/days of the initial phases of discovery. In that way they create their own solution and have no resistance;
4. the seller/coach/supervisor is seen as a true advisor, and any competition is dispensed with.
5. the relationship between Partner and change agent becomes loyal;
6. pitching and presenting is minimized, as the solution comes from the Partner and the seller/coach just supplies it.

We’ve been trained to have answers, to uncover ‘pain’. But we can share the job with our Partners: they have the detail; we have the overview. Between us, we’ve got the whole picture.

Help your Partner change and have a full set of resources. Be the navigator that supports them. Don’t have the answers, have the questions. Trust your partners to do their own changing. Your job is to serve, and supply the appropriate solution when they discover how to manage their own change.

Influencing Change – A Guide For Sellers, Coaches, And Supervisors is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com